Apple unveils 29-armed robot designed to disassemble old iPhones

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Apple cranks out millions of iPhones every quarter, but have you ever wondered what happens to all those devices when they reach the end of their lives? Many of them end up in landfills with other mobile devices that have outlived their usefulness, but some will be recycled. Apple recently decided to take iPhone recycling seriously and the result is Liam. No, Liam is not a factory worker or engineer. Liam is a robot with 29 arms built for the purpose of tearing old iPhones down at breakneck speed.

While some steps in the construction of an iPhone are done by machines, much of the process is handled by human assembly line workers. In fact, Foxconn recently had to admit that it’s ongoing efforts to develop an assembly robot had hit a rough patch. The robot arms simply aren’t accurate enough to put an iPhone together. However, after three years of work in secret, Apple engineers have designed one that’s able to take them apart.

The video posted by Apple doesn’t make it entirely apparent, but Liam is a huge robot. It’s actually more of a reverse assembly line with 29 individual arms, each tasked with holding the phone or liberating different components from the chassis. As many as 40 phones can be queued up on the conveyor belt that feeds Liam. It all starts with an arm that pulls the screen assembly off so a camera can scan the device and figure out which model it is. This is important as the location of screws and components can change from one generation to the next.

Before all the bits and pieces are grabbed by Liam’s multitude of robotic arms, the battery is removed. Even a long unplugged lithium-ion battery can be dangerous if it’s damaged during the disassembly process. Apple says that Liam can disassemble 350 iPhones per hour (1.2 million per year), which is thanks to its ability to multitask. At some stations, there may be more than one arm working to remove screws and pull out circuit boards. That’s a lot of phones, and Liam doesn’t even have to work weekends.

The goal is to get all the useful materials out of an iPhone as efficiently as possible. Gold, copper, cobalt, and other minerals are all found in phones. If you just throw away an old phone, someone has to mine more minerals out of the ground to build new ones. Sometimes those minerals are mined or sold under suspicious circumstances, and then there’s the environmental impact of increased mining. Recycled materials come with fewer ethical concerns, but it can cut costs too.

Apple is looking to increase Liam’s supply of old iPhones to take apart with a new recycling program called Apple Renew. You can send your old Apple devices in to be recycled and you’ll get a gift card back with the value of the device, assuming it has any.

Tagged In

Neat move, hopefully all of silicon valley keeps going in this direction.

Bluetooth

Agree – But I still don´t get that a human can do more accurate job than a robot!

necroignis

precision robots are costly and generally require very accurate placement of the objects being worked on humans can adapt fairly easy to these almost insignificant differences with no loss of speed. a machine cannot adapt so the might very well miss a connection or make a wrong one when soldering parts together

Cestarian

It’s because AI isn’t at the level of being able to see, and feel (as in touch) the same way as humans do and thus robots can pretty much only be created today as a “one pattern” kind of devices.they can’t “see” what they’re disassembling, they can’t “feel” when something is off and because of that they also can’t see when products are say dirty (which is pretty bad for recycling, you gotta remove the dust and dirt off stuff) and it basically can’t make decisions or take initiative by itself.

They can only do what they are explicitly told to do. These things it does far better and more accurately than a human, but as soon as you step outside of it’s explicit boundaries then it’s efficiency will drop or it will stop doing it’s job correctly.

With better ai we will be able to create more advanced and effective multi or general purpose robots, after which we will of course ascend to android territory slowly.

Chase Champion

wrong. they can see better than us. the problem is accuracy. robots have range of motion that can only be narrowed down to x amount of microns due to the servos and machining tolerances stacking up. we are very very close to being able to manufacture iphones. i think they require like 3 micron tolerancing and we can nail it down to 5 right now. this was also about a year ago. i wouldnt be surprised at all if the latest generation of robotic arms can be controlled accurately enough to hit the quality control requirements.

also… as far as efficiency? tesla currently employes cells, there are multiple cells each doing the same thing, so that if one fails, its fine, they also emplore reject offloading, so if something is not accurate the machine does not stop like it used to, the bad part goes into a reject offload station and is then re-introduced back into the line for a second try, if it fails again then its scrapped. The old way of manufacturing is a thing of the past. i can honestly say that robotic manufacturing WILL replace humans in 10 years…

that being said, the supply chain is where it breaks down, you still need humans to fill parts into the machine, deliver the parts, inventory the parts, yadda yadda… until all of your distributers automate their systems humans will never be completely out of the loop.

(this coming from 10 years of experience in automation with conveyors, robotics, and lean manufacturing cells)

Kyle

There’s nothing more dangerous than giving Liam a cell phone. Haven’t these engineers ever seen a Liam Neeson movie!?

Just kidding. But this is seriously pretty cool. There’s probably some strict “Design the next phone with the screws in the EXACT same spot” orders coming down to the engineers in charge of designing the new phones though.

necroignis

no because they give liam the pattern of the screws with instruction on removing them and he is all set to disassemble the phone, in reality Liam is just following a preset pattern of instructions, so while he may have many arms he is actually little more than a computer programmable robot

PSFUL

Apple saving the planet by giving your jobs to robots!

Vidya Wasi

Weather report predicts some human rain in the coming months.
Will those jumping-catching-nets hold for all of them?

Mike T Walker

Robots and AI will be taking 25% of all jobs in the next 10 years. Countries are experimenting with basic income now to keep the money flowing. When a machine replaces a job, the work is still getting done, so its not necessarily a bad thing, but we need to redistribute the wealth in a way that all society benefits, not just a few at the top of a corporate ladder.

Cestarian

Countries as in just Finland.

DecksUpMySleeve

Switzerland?

Athenasius

Quite a few jobs on some production lines are going back to human operators, They were finding that many production lines were getting stalled due to a robot getting stuck and not being able to adapt to a situation. So they started hiring humans again for certain parts of the process.

Cestarian

Not just apple, if progress goes well then within as little as 2 decades the vast majority of jobs will be fully automated by robots instead of humans.

This isn’t bad, this is progress, evolution of technology, evolution of industry and this is where society lagging behind the super fast developing technology becomes apparent to anyone.

Corrupt and greedy governments can’t even consider making it feasible for their country’s population to live a decent life without having a job, so people will end out on the street and either society will pick itself apart, piece by piece as a result until there’s little left; or this will be fixed.

Jigar

More like children’s Job to robots…

Sayed ahamed

Most of the Professions in the world by the turn of next century would be intellectual in nature with less handwork and more brain-work or smartwork

Vidya Wasi

So apple thinks children are too expensive now?
Is apple downsizing due to economic issues?
/ sad but true jokes done.

The robot is a start but it doesn’t do a good job removing all the parts that could be repurposed.

Diego

we’re sure you can do a better job.
=

TorrentFreakster

If I were interested at all I’m sure I could but It’s not the point!!
Iphones were not designed to be taken apart. Apple doesn’t like people investigating their technology to see just how crappy and cheaply designed it is. Apple doesn’t like people going to a non-apple shop to get their phone fixed either.
Hence Iphones are non-environmentally friendly by design.
This robot is a workaround of the source issue. The problem that Apple doesn’t want to solve.

Making Iphones reparable in any shop with replaceable components would be huge improvement but Apple would lose profit on that. They can’t use premium exuberant prices doing it that way. Well they could but it wouldn’t work.

XenoSilvano

Get the popcorn ready because this is going to be one hell of a show, let us see how humanity will get itself out of this one.

Tin Švagelj

Sure. Instead of actually paying people, waste energy which is produced by environment polluting nuclear reactors and then try to present is as a good thing. Bravo Apple!

Kyle

coal plants*

Tin Švagelj

You are correct. China’s main sources of energy are coal and oil. My point still stands – they greatly pollute environment.

You can go the other way too: Instead of hiring humans which produce tons of waste every day jost to live, be it from garbage, be it from using electricity, or polluting the environment using cars, and which additionaly result in incredible costs for the company to do braindead work, they just use a robot.

Tin Švagelj

I agree, but humans will produce tons of waste in either case (having to work might even prevent them from producing it) and you are rationalising using machines which by definition use energy because if people worked they would use energy? Wait what?

Yeah, only valid argument here is people having to use cars to get to their workplace and it’s cheaper for the company to use robots. Second one is only good for that company and not for general public because in most countries there’s quite a high rate of unemployment.

So we’re left with the cars problem. Ride a bike, it’s cheaper! There, problem solved.

Ed Beecher

Or, they could just make less iPhones (LOL)

This Ain’t Kyle

Oh no, don’t show the FBI! They’ll want to use it to get the data out too. “…IN the computer… she said it’s IN the computer…”

Fast_Turtle

Instead of the major variations of internal design, why don’t they standardize the guts and make it easy for a robot to dis/assemble the blasted things? FoxCom is already trying to get rid of their workers due to costs – keep in mind that robots take no breaks, don’t ask for pay raises and the only time the strike is when the power is out and humans can’t work then either.

necroignis

because they program the patterns of the internals to the robot, then it is no more difficult to disassemble the phones despite the differences

Uncle_Fred

Some things can’t be replaced, but I think the video cuts off early and missed when he says: “but your old jobs aren’t one of them.”

Gil G

Shiva H. Vishnu!

Alin Matei

Hey is that the iphone 7? There is no camera bump :)

DecksUpMySleeve

Don’t worry iDiots, your freshest phone will still be produced by the freshest child fingers..

Moonkey

The children working on them must be pretty accurate, considering…

But hey, you said it. 10/10

Chase Champion

cant believe they didnt do it sooner, those look like cognex cameras, which can identify things very accurately. We do this same thing with tesla to manufacture the battery packs. automation has come a long ways with fiber optics and plc’s. as well as accuracy on linear rails and servo drives/robots.

danny96

Now you know apple will fool you again

danny96

Lol they can make a robot but they cant make the battery last

dave

Yes great, who needs work or money anyway?

The Watson

Makes sense using a robot for recycling. You need a certain amount of speed to make recycling worthwhile. Maybe this will make an impact on all electronic manufacturers.

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